Facebook says users do 500 million searches on Facebook per day. And Facebook is rising in the charts of where the most searches are done online. Marketing expert Brian Carter explains what you need to know to take advantage of this growing opportunity.

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From the author of

More than 800 million users return to Facebook at least once a month. As of September 2011, U.S. citizens spend somewhere between a sixth and a third of their total online time on Facebook. Facebook is far and away the leader in social media. Its biggest rival for online dominance is Google (see Figure 1), and Google’s main product is search. It seems as if the two biggest 800-pound gorillas on the web are Google and Facebook, and their empires, respectively, are based on search and social. But could Facebook be planning to compete with Google in the search arena as well?

An even more clear declaration of how important Facebook thinks search is came from Brian Piepgrass, Facebook’s Internet marketing manager, when he spoke in November 2011 in Las Vegas at the longest running Internet marketing conference in the world, PubCon.

How Facebook Search Works and Its User Interface Problems

There’s a really cool way to get extensive Facebook search results: by clicking on the magnifying glass. You get results that you can filter specifically for pages, people, groups, apps, events, music, the web, and more (see Figure
2).

But a lot of people either just click on one of the choices that comes up (in Facebook’s neat automatic drop-down list) while they’re typing, or they press Return after their search, which just takes you to whichever automatic drop-down selection you have selected, which is probably the top one because you just clicked in the search box to get there (see Figure
3).

Other search engines give you full results when you press Return. Not Facebook. So it takes a little bit of extra effort, going back to the mouse, to get the full results, and a lot of people miss them. That means that as a business, you have a lot smaller space to fit into. Instead of, as on Google, a page of search results to choose froma situation where it’s ok to show up in the top 5 or top 10if you don’t show up as the top page or group on Facebook, you won’t be in the search auto drop-down, and you won’t be seen.